Batman: Arkham City Lets You Run Free

This is what Rocksteady Studios, and most reviewers of Batman: Arkham City, want you to take away from a complicated experience. The sequel to previously the best superhero videogame ever made, Arkham Asylum, this one throws you, as Batman, into the heart of Gotham City and lets you run free. You have all of Batman’s tools, from the humble Batarang to the more exotic Explosive Gel and Remote Electrical Charge, a Taser fit for a SWAT team. You swing and swoop around rooftops with a grappling hook and your Bat-Cape. You beat up thugs with grace and aplomb and barely repressed anger. You perform the world’s greatest detective work, tracing bullet trajectories and tracking bloodstains across the city. You make small talk with Alfred in your earpiece. You can go wherever you like. You are Batman.

An iconic moment is when you briefly pause in Arkham City’s open world to perch at the edge of a rooftop or on the head of a gargoyle under the open sky, Batman’s cape flowing, Batman fleetingly at peace with the night before he pounces back onto the shaved head of a criminal in the dark. But this isn’t anything like the shot of Christian Bale in The Dark Knight, his silhouette framed by moonlight on a stark gray Gotham skyscraper. It’s nothing so stark and suggestive. Rocksteady’s vision of Batman and Gotham has more in common with Tim Burton’s films, saturating the landscape with carnival colors and bringing a heavy dose of absurdity down on the environment.

This isn’t really Gotham City, either, and so this isn’t quite the Batman dream we’ve all awaited. This is Arkham City, a subsection of Gotham that the crazy shrink Dr. Hugo Strange has transformed into a sprawling prison compound—a necessary quarantine for all of Gotham’s pathological minds that, as he says, doesn’t discriminate between supervillain and regular old villain. Just like the confined island asylum of the first game, this sprawling city is nonetheless a place for the sick, thick with a toxic atmosphere. Although Arkham City is technically an open-world game—where you’re free to abandon the main storyline at any time and pursue a number of addicting side-quests—it doesn’t contain some of the atmospheric hallmarks of a Grand Theft Auto, Infamous or Skyrim. There aren’t any ordinary people walking these streets, minding their daily business before getting run over, run down in crossfire, or just run into on the sidewalk. This is a ghost town, an ornate Dickensian one, populated by prisoners, gang members, gang leaders, cops, worse cops, and you, Batman.

So this is how Rocksteady has opened up your world while maintaining a tight narrative control over your—Batman’s—story. There’s none of the cognitive dissonance of a game like L.A. Noire, where a young upstart cop could plow his car through strolling pedestrians into some poor housewife’s flower bed. There may actually not be enough! For as crazy as everything and everyone in Arkham City is, it all makes so much sense that you might realize being Batman isn’t just playtime. It’s a full-time job.

What the movies and comic books and television series don’t show is Batman’s downtime. They’re free to cut from action to suspense to resolution, across time and place, presenting an unbroken string of good superhero stuff. But as a sandbox videogame where you set your own path and pace, Arkham City doesn’t cut any moments out of the picture. It gives you a sense of what it might be like to really live in Batman’s boots, from moment to moment.

The thing is, Rocksteady doesn’t want you to be bored or even pause for reflection while playing this game. It wouldn’t be in character for Batman to go for a random walk, or go on dates, or go fishing. So Batman doesn’t really get any downtime here, either. Everywhere he goes, something is calling out for his attention. Some political prisoner needs to be saved in an alley. Some murder mystery needs to be solved. The Riddler’s installed logic and pressure-plate puzzles all over the city, and Batman would never let himself be outsmarted. The serial killer Zsasz has pay phones ringing all over the city, and if Batman leaves any of them unanswered, Zsasz claims another victim. Even the Joker, who’s a little worse for wear than last time, has party balloons stung up across the city. If Batman’s ever completely at a loss, he can climb up and pop them loudly. This generates experience points for equipment and combat upgrades, and is also neatly symbolic.

Batman’s permanently tuned into the local broadcast frequencies, so as he flies above the city, he can hear everything that everyone is saying down below. They’re usually thugs vigorously (and violently) debating the relative merits of working for the Joker, the Penguin or Two-Face, sometimes contemplating new employment opportunities with a rival gang, or recounting exactly how Batman injured them on their last run-in; very often expressing a paranoid fear that Batman’s about to swoop down and break those same bones again. What a tease. Even up above, Batman’s never exactly free.

This might be what it’s like to be a superhero—so many things on the mind, never a moment’s rest. The game’s great trick is that you have dozens of ways to waste your time; and Batman, who takes himself more seriously than every other superhero except maybe for Cyclops, never wastes his time. Even when Batman’s collecting Riddler Trophies, chasing phone calls, or playing an alternate-reality game that trains him to move in new ways, he is never not doing vitally important work for himself and the Gotham public. That’s why you are Batman. The Batsuit, essentially a giant smartphone, means you’re always on call in Batman’s skin.

You carry more Bat-tools than the controller can even handle. If the game didn’t remind you which tools to equip, which buttons to press, and when to press them, you would probably have to give up being Batman. You have to know how to do a lot in order to uphold Batman’s responsibilities. (Luckily the basic ubiquitous fistfights remain intuitive and inhumanly fluid, the studio’s crowning achievement.) Although the Arkham City interface by default guides you through every important situation and encounter, the information you must process is still staggering in the first few hours. The city makes no sense, the screen is dense with ledges and lights, and it’s as claustrophobic as that first Intensive Treatment hallway in the asylum in 2009. It takes a good couple of hours to adjust to the sensory overload and settle into a long, long night of work.

It’s also snowing in Arkham City, which lends the place a dark winter wonderland feel that fits the game’s surplus of toys and surprises. Still, I think any critic saying that the city is the “real star” of Arkham City is mistaken. It is a painstakingly, lovingly crafted space, but with one standout exception, the focus is very much on Batman, literally. As in Arkham Asylum, the camera hovers inches from Batman’s shoulder, insisting that you feel close to Batman in body as well as in spirit. But this makes it harder to observe, study, and truly know the world around him. More often, you’re pressed to wonder how Batman might be feeling beneath that hardened Bat-exterior.

In stretching your attention thinner than the closed corridors and rooms of Arkham Asylum, this game also keeps a looser grip on Batman’s psychology. Asylum emphasized his fears and psychoses; City takes a widescreen view. We get Batman as vigilante, prone to random acts of violence against any thugs unlucky enough to cross his flightpath. In one sense, the open city frees him from self-interrogation; he can lash out on a street corner without the Joker cross-examining his every move. But in another, he’s even more stuck to his environment than before. Unlike Gotham, Arkham City is a police state. Dr. Strange’s TYGER security force watches Batman from spy cameras on buildings and a helicopter circling above. He’s a small bat in a maze, playing into Strange’s grand experiment as much as he outwits vanilla goons and upends gang squabbling. Everything points back to Batman.

Which is why the small handful of playable Catwoman episodes is such an important inclusion. If you don’t have the download code included in new copies of the game, you have to purchase the episodes separately, but you should. Catwoman plays out like a B-side to Arkham City, where everyone’s expecting Batman when she walks through the doorway and seems disappointed they have to play with the girl. But this is why being Catwoman is such a relief: she doesn’t have to be the hero. It is also disturbingly satisfying to climb around the city by snapping and curling Catwoman’s whip around its buildings. I’d argue her dominatrix aggression puts Catwoman much more in control of her environment than Bruce Wayne’s millions can afford.

The bigger story that both these Rocksteady games are telling is that a great superhero game, where every piece must be in character and in canon, can’t give up room for you to draw your own conclusions or feel your own feelings. But you can still appreciate virtuosos at work building the universe you live in, the concrete under your feet, the very air you breathe, as Batman.